Unfinished projects:
20. The worst cruiser in the world: The L-class
Although Hitler publicly talked about Great Britain as an Aryan brother nation and natural ally of Germany, his naval planners tailored Germany's future fleet for fighting Britain. Long-ranged surface raiding missions against British trade were seen as the ideal way of fighting the Royal Navy and negating their numerical superiority. Deutschland and Admiral Graf Spee were the first ships designed to perform such missions, but the Z-Plan of 1938 went a lot further: No less than twelve additional P-type 'Panzerschiffe' were to be built, each of them twice the size of Graf Spee, carrying the same armament and only marginally more protection, but three times the engine power for eight knots more design speed and enough diesel for a range of 15.000 miles at 20 knots. This design did not survive the outbreak of the war, when all plants capable of building diesel engines were devoted to the submarine programme and the P-type was re-designed into the 'Handelszerstörer' with turbine propulsion and 'only' 10.000 miles range (see below). The P-cruisers however were not to operate alone, but in small task forces containing light cruisers and/or super-large destroyers. The former were to have mixed propulsion of diesels and turbines for a top speed of 36 knots and still a range of 12.000 miles at 20 knots on a displacement of 8.000 tons. With that sort of mobility requirements (nearly twice the designed hp and fuel capacity of the only marginally smaller British Apollo-class), all other parameters had to be curtailed. Main armament was eight 150mm guns, anti-air was limited to four 88mm and eight 37mm guns and protection was minimal (50mm sides, 30mm decks). Despite this diminutive fighting and especially protective value, the final design came out 350 tons overweight. Two ships were begun in 1938, two more in 1939; before the second pair was laid down, the design was so heavily criticized that Raeder ordered a revision in order to improve protection and defensive armament for the third pair. The same improvements were to be applied to a planned second batch of another six units. The redesign let propulsion and main armament the same, but increased side protection to 80mm and decks to 45mm; anti-air armament was upgraded to eight 105mm, twelve 37mm and sixteen 20mm. As before, two airplanes and eight 533mm torpedo tubes were shipped. Speed dropped to 34,5 knots, range remained the same. The final design for the last two units (P and Q) displaced 9.500 tons - as much as a British Town-class cruiser, to which they compared most unfavourably in terms of firepower and protection. Although this disadvantage was obvious, construction of P and Q was authorized anyway in 1939; if completed, they would have looked like this:
Construction of the second pair was stopped forthwith when the war started; the first and third pairs were proceeded with. The first pair was also cancelled in May 1940 and the material transferred to the third pair, which alone remained under construction. Progress was slow due to low priority. A re-design to turbine-only propulsion was approved in November 1940, resulting in a one-year delay; by late 1941, the planned launch date had been moved to mid-1943. They were even behind this revised schedule when Hitler ordered the cancellation of all warships above destroyer size in January 1943, and no one really missed them when they were broken up during the first half of 1943. According to standard German practice, the L-class cruisers were to bear names of German light cruisers which were lost during the first world war. Originally, the names Breslau, Dresden, Wiesbaden, Magdeburg, Rostock and Mainz were to be allocated; when two far advanced Dutch cruisers were captured, the names Wiesbaden and Breslau were transferred to them and Bremen and Elbing were substituted. No decision as to which ship was to receive which name was ever made, but it was fairly sure that P and Q would have been named Rostock and Mainz, because of the six possible namesakes, these two had perished in the most heroic way.
Greetings
GD
Great work.
